Squillaci celebrates his winner
Arsenal’s 1-0 win at home to Stoke last night proves that they have that quality befitting all champions – winning when playing poorly.
The above is, of course, a load of bollocks and one of the football press’s laziest clichés. It ranks alongside the term “you’re never too good to go down” in inane wisdoms, and is typical Match of the Day fare for pundits like Alan Shearer, who can usually hardly be bothered to open his mouth, much less excite his cluster of brain cells into producing a genuine insight.
The truth is that last night’s reveals much less about the eventual destination of the Premier League trophy than it does about how one team found it hard to grind down a resilient side, and how when the match expired, Arsenal had scored more goals than Stoke.
Winning when playing badly isn’t the stuff of champions. Blackpool got completely outplayed by Tottenham on Tuesday night but beat them 3-1 – was that the ‘stuff of champions’? The team that does eventually accrue the most points this season will reach their goal not by possessing some nebulous X-factor, but more likely by maintaining a consistent level of performance above that of their rivals. That lends itself a little less readily to sound bite, admittedly.
The reason these clichés get trotted out is abundantly clear – because journalists have a job to do, no matter how unremarkable their subject matter is. If there is no story, they must make one, and just another three points isn’t much of a story.
Manchester United and Chelsea have often given the impression of ‘winning when playing badly’ in recent seasons, but that’s a myth as big as the one that says United are ‘lucky’ because they score a lot of late goals. 1-0 victories may not be emphatic, but they are still wins, and they come about by breaching the opponent’s defence and having the requisite levels of defensive organisation and resilience to resist an equaliser. It’s called knowing how to win football matches. In short, if you have to boil it down to a word or expression, the league champions will be the league’s ‘winningest’ team. José Mourinho’s Chelsea won titles on strengths such as these, and it isn’t a magic formula, it’s something instilled in the team through hundreds of hours on the training ground and a hearty serving of intelligent man management.
But who’s the winningest of them all this season? Increasingly it’s looking like a two-horse race. Manchester City will be 11 points adrift if their neighbours win at Wigan on the weekend, while Arsenal will be keeping a close eye on United’s two games in three days, the second of which is a potentially drawingest trip to Stamford Bridge.
There’s not a lot else going on. Don’t get me started on this sanctimonious shite. It willfully and disingenuously misses the point in order to stick up for the shitkicking underdog. Elsewhere, Arsenal have caused upset by ‘immorally’ signing a youth player from Barcelona, who snaffled Lionel Messi from Newell’s Old Boys when he was thirteen. Just saying. And more football press bollocks can also be found on the Guardian, with this spectacularly unfair dressing down of Manchester United’s Darron Gibson, the thrust of which states that he isn’t Paul Scholes. Gibson’s a utility player, filling in in a five-man midfield when an established midfielder needs a rest, and I don’t think anyone’s ever suggested otherwise. Still, it probably provoked a flurry of hits from indignant United fans for the Guardian’s website, which is obviously the important thing.
So that concludes a fairly Arsenal-centric, media-phobic blog for the day. Come back tomorrow, I might be more cheery!
